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George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin: The Real Tragedy

That the Martin/Zimmerman affair was a tragic waste of human life may be the safest bromide in current cultural circulation. And indeed, it is the natural reaction to such senseless violence.

But the deeper truth of the event is a much darker inversion of that sentiment. The altercation was itself a product of wasted lives, of men living without a productive purpose. A terrible waste of human life on a qualitative level led to a clear and present death in the Martin/Zimmerman affair.

What should have been most striking about the case is the fact that both men were ready to escalate the slightest suspicion into a death match. If you have meaning and purpose in life, you probably aren't going to endlessly scour your neighborhood looking for troublemakers. Zimmerman had reportedly called 911 46 times in the last six years to report everything from unattended trash to 'suspicious characters'. This should strike anybody with a life as excessive, possibly bordering on insane.

By the same token, it should be clear from the offensive nature of George Zimmerman's wounds that Trayvon Martin was more than willing to confirm Mr. Zimmerman's paranoia by dealing with the discomforting situation of feeling followed (a situation, one might add, that happens to people every day without resulting in a fight to the death),by slamming his head repeatedly against concrete. Given that Martin was on tenuous grounds at school, it's safe to say that this aggressive, impulsive behavior of his was a natural result of living in a society that has entirely abandoned a generation of youth to a failed education system that leaves even its graduates without tangible skills or a future.

You can argue about race until you are blue in the face, but only a more universal sickness can explain this kind of behavior. Here in our fake 21st century society, the old frontier promise of a free and vibrant economy has faded away into a neo-Soviet corporatist regime and all healthy, productive energy has been drained into a black hole of bureaucracy and frustration. In a broad sense, Zimmerman and Martin are not both guilty, but both victims of a political/economic/cultural order that has converted the old American dream of self-ownership into a reality of total dispossession — a truly sad spectacle.

We were once cowboys and astronauts, and our struggles made sense out of their purpose. The total meaninglessness of the Zimmerman/Martin game of cat and mouse is really overwhelming if you consider what men once were, and could be, in this country.

Creators were once the focus of culture, not the melodramatic law and order obsession that is piped through every television in the form of crime shows and regular show trials. Now we build nothing, produce nothing, create nothing. You're more of a cultural sensation if you kill somebody than if you show courage and dedication (compare the volume of Zimmerman coverage to that of Snowden in the American media). The only thing left to do is engage in pointless battles for temporary security as you wander a post-apocalpytic wasteland. The real outrage should not be over the verdict going one way or another, but that the quality of American life has been degraded to the point that two men would be willing to commit to a death match on the most faint suspicion of each other. This is "the new normal".

The crisis of our times is not confined to a particular race or subsection of society. If you take a step back from the heated superficial racial coverage, you realize that it is not a sick society that acquits George Zimmerman, but rather it is a sick society in which there is so little peace of mind that two perfect strangers without any real animus against each other end up fighting to the death. This is not merely the product of racism or a 'thug' subculture, as the predictable left/right dialog suggests, but rather of the total abandonment of genuine self-development that leaves paranoia, fists, and guns as the only tools one has to deal with in a world one cannot creatively engage.

This mentality started not with an overzealous neighborhood watchman and a teenager with Skittles in Sanford, Florida, but with the upper echelons of society. Recall that the mega-banks, who looted the U.S. Treasury after their failure, then used the NYC police to crush Occupy Wall Street with an iron fist. It is always empty people without the ability to create for themselves that preoccupy themselves with matters of crime and violence. Perhaps these protestors should be directing their rage against the infinitely more powerful social entities that really forced the change of the United States from a productive society to a predator society by their own crimes rather than getting so absorbed in the latest diversionary outrage...

COMMENTS

Anonymous says:03 Dec 2013 15:20 EST

You millenials have no idea how little you actually think for yourselves. You only "think" at the retarded level of "facts" manufactured for you by the Baby-Boomers whom you hate. The entire "civil rights movement" and equality horseshit are complete fictions created by that generation of liars, thieves, and murderers. Blame yourself if you want, but don't dare blame me for your "racist" boogeymen. That is so 1960's.

Anonymous says:30 Sep 2013 20:05 EDT

what a bunch of horsesh!t.

"We" were cowboys and astronauts? Who is we? Look at their faces, something's going to jump right out at you and it's not politically correct to mention: none of them look like St. Trayvawn OR George Zimmerman.